Feiffer Quotes & Sayings

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underpriviledged was overused, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime, but I have a great vocabulary. — Jules Feiffer

I couldn't stand boy companions," he [Jules Feiffer] wrote in his 1965 essay " The Great Comic Book Heroes. "Robin was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better and live better...He was obviously an A student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd - God, how I hate him. You can imagine how please I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag. — Glen Weldon

Remember when you were a kid and the boys didn't like the girls? Only sissies liked girls? What I'm trying to tell you is that nothing's changed. You think boys grow out of not liking girls, but we don't grow out of it. We just grow horny. That's the problem. We mix up liking pussy for liking girls. Believe me, one couldn't have less to do with the other. — Jules Feiffer

Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence. — Jules Feiffer

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them? — Jules Feiffer

I'm well beyond dyslexic: I have no sense of direction; I never know where I am. — Jules Feiffer

Design is so important because chaos is so hard — Jules Feiffer

When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on. — Jules Feiffer

Good swiping is an art in itself. — Jules Feiffer

Kids are in ongoing need of support, and they get various versions of it from grownups which aren't legitimate - a grownup's version of what we think you should have. We tell you what creativity is, and we even tell you what you're thinking. — Jules Feiffer

Be warned against all 'good' advice because 'good' advice is necessarily 'safe' advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility
one of the crushing problems of our time. — Jules Feiffer

There's no rap against comics that isn't true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it - and they kind of gloried in that. — Jules Feiffer

We want playmates we can own. — Jules Feiffer

If you are not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside? — Jules Feiffer

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function. — Jules Feiffer

Eventually, if it's on your mind, you stumble on it. You need a certain amount of luck and persistence. — Jules Feiffer

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain. — Jules Feiffer

Over the years, I discovered over and over again that once you lose control, you have a chance of getting good at it. And once you're controlling the work, it's not going to be very good, or it won't be as good as it should be. — Jules Feiffer

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. — Jules Feiffer

It is not size or age that separates children from adults. It is responsibility. — Jules Feiffer

Design is important because chaos is so hard. — Jules Feiffer

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education. — Jules Feiffer

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw. — Jules Feiffer

I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older. — Alison Bechdel

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal. — Jules Feiffer

I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways. — Jules Feiffer

I read because the women that I liked when I was a teenager lived down in Greenwich Village and they all had those black clothes. The Jules Feiffer women with the black leather bags and the blonde hair and the silver earrings and they all had read Proust and Kafka and Nietzche. And so when I said, 'No, the only thing I've ever read were two books by Mickey Spillane,' they would look at their watch and I was out. So in order to be able to carry on a conversation with these women who I thought were so beautiful and fascinating, I had to read. So I read. But it wasn't something I did out of love. I did it out of lust. — Woody Allen

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence. — Jules Feiffer

I think we overrate experience and what we've been through in terms of our success at doing the work we do. There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. — Jules Feiffer

As cartoonist Jules Feiffer puts it: I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's walk, my father's opinions and my mother's contempt for my father. — Tara Brach

There's some brain damage, but it may be that very brain damage that allows me to do the work I do. — Jules Feiffer

We are all continually embarking on first drafts, in every aspect of our lives. — Jules Feiffer

I seemed to have instinctually a strong idea of how the strip had to be written from the beginning. That changed too, but it was more in the direction of where it was headed. I didn't have a clue as to the drawing style, because the drawing style that I was groomed on from the beginning was newspaper comic strips, which were much more conventional. — Jules Feiffer

I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism. — Jules Feiffer